The New Colors of Clal: Organization Steps Forward to ‘Make Jewish a Public Good’

Inaugural program of LEAP, a partnership between Clal and the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Photo courtesy UPenn.

By Maayan JaffeeJewish Philanthropy

The Pew Research Center statistics on Jewish identity and pride are regurgitated by Jewish organizations, fearing a collapse of the Jewish people in the States. Rabbi Irwin Kula, co-president of Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership has a different take. These same statistics – more than nine-in-ten Jews (94%) agree they are “proud to be Jewish;” three-quarters (75%) say they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and about six-in-ten (63%) say they have a special responsibility to care for Jews in need around the world – are not problems.

“We don’t have a Jewish identity problem,” says Kula. “The problem is that the majority of Jews who are proud of their identities and feel connected to their religion are not using the products, services and delivery systems of the organized Jewish community.”

Kula, together with co-president Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, are recapturing the Clal mission of its founders Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg and Elie Wiesel.

“Now, we are 100 percent committed to making Jewish a public good,” says Kula.

What does it mean? Hirschfield, who coined the phrase, says it’s very simple: making all things Jewish more accessible, more meaningful, more useable and more impactful in more ways to more people.

“The shift is in the metric,” explains Kula. “It is not how to make people more Jewish, anymore. It is how can I use Jewish wisdom and practices to help human beings flourish and ensure the public good?”

Clal plans to implement four strategies over the next five to 10 years to help it achieve its goal. First, it will find new ways to invest in and nurture a cohort of up to 350 rabbis engaged in Clal’s Rabbis Without Borders (RWB) program. The rabbis in the RWB Network are committed to pushing the borders of what it means to be a rabbi today. Though the rabbis in the program span denominations, geography and experience, they collectively seek to share their Torah in pluralistic, innovative ways grounded by a sense of service to all.

Rabbi Rebecca W. Sirbu, director of RWB, describes RWB rabbis as “the leadership class” and the most capable of helping Clal fulfill its mission through their amplified Jewish educations and knowledge. The question says Sirbu, “How do we as rabbis offer Judaism wisdom in a different way?”

Since launching RWB and adopting a “beyond borders” approach to their rabbinates, the rabbis report that 96 percent of fellows have ” strengthened and increased their comfort crossing denominational and institutional boundaries;” 91% have created new programs in their synagogue/organization; and 81% have seen an increase in participation in programs and use of services in their synagogue or organization.

Now, Clal will harness RWB rabbis who have completed the RWB fellowship to form the RWB Service Corps to reach Jews who do not have access to rabbinical services. Each of 150 rabbis has pledged to donate two to three days a year of their time, expertise and pastoral presence to serve as part of the corp. As RWB grows to 350 rabbis, this would amount to 600 days of service or two years of full-time placement.

Concurrently, Clal is gathering seven clergy/lay leader teams in a new program called Leaders Without Borders. The teams will incubate new programs on topics ranging from the sociology of religion in America today, how to foster innovation in a communal setting, how to engage with people in a pluralist environment, and the intersection of positive psychology and religion.

Research & Development

Another new program, Taamei Mitzvah, is being run by Ayalon Eliach to ask the question of whether or not Jewish wisdom works.

“Most rabbis don’t think of the role of a mitzvah as to get a job done, but they are very sophisticated tools and technologies that have reasons. We are taking 40 mitzvoth and asking the question: What is the job or utility, the taam or the purpose of this mitzvah?” explains Kula.

He continues: “Over the past two decades research in positive psychology has discovered the character strength and virtues that enable people to live flourishing lives. We will apply this research to Jewish practice to learn how, whether, and which Jewish practices lead to measurable increases in well-being and quality of life. Essentially, we will reconnect Jewish practices to the actual the virtues and character strengths they are designed to cultivate and then study whether these practices actually work to increase our baseline of these qualities.”

This will be the first study in America of the impact of religious practice, aside from meditation, on human flourishing and will contribute to Jewish life as well as the fields of positive psychology and religion.

Applications & Innovations

A new Clal Collaboratory, under the direction of Rabbi Elan Babchuck, will support rabbinic entrepreneurs on their path to building innovative projects that catalytically serve both extant and emergent communities. This innovation incubator provides the technical, managerial, philosophical and theological support the entrepreneurs need to create the greatest opportunity for success.

But Kula and Hirschfield understand that innovation does not mean success, but rather pushing the envelope.

“Innovation is not whether it always works or whether we like what emerges – sometimes we won’t. We want to create a genuine culture of Jewish experimentation. The measurement will be whether more people are using Judaism to become the people they want to be,” says Hirschfield.

“The goal is to launch 50 or 60 of these [innovative projects], says Kula. “If 20 make it that would be fantastic.”

Other new projects, such as LEAP, a partnership between Clal and the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, will work to leverage, expand and popularize Judaism by studying a shared topic that has the potential to shape the scholars’ chosen fields, but also humanities as a whole and contemporary Jewish culture and community.

“It’s about leveraging great ideas so that they reach and serve the widest possible audience,” says Hirschfield.

Media & Communications

Finally, through The Wisdom Daily, a new site for political, cultural and spiritual commentary and analysis, will try to help people address the biggest questions they face both as individuals and a society; lift people out of the mind-numbing polarization that typify most public debate and spiritual teaching; and offer people greater purpose and happiness in their daily lives.

Clal will also work to create rabbi communicators that can speak to the greater public about Jewish ideas and wisdom, through the media and other public outlets.

Clal is being funded through multiple sources, says Hirschfield, including a generous board, larger foundational grants and a generous individual donor base.

“It’s about serving the world as Jews – Jewishly,” says Hirschfield. “Our Jewish world is often driven by panic about the erosion of the Jewish people or concern with better marketing. … The opportunities are far greater than the things we need to fear.”

Comments

I certainly admire, respect and commend Clal, Rabbi Irwin Kula and the many creative people associated with CLAL. But I do take issue with the notion that “The problem is that the majority of Jews who are proud of their identities and feel connected to their religion are not using the products, services and delivery systems of the organized Jewish community.” Or that anybody serious — including myself — fear for the “collapse of the Jewish people in the States.”

The positive data that Ms. Jaffe cites all pertain to feelings, which constitute only one element in Jewish identity — or that of any other religious or ethnic group (and Jews are an ethnos — a People — with a religion). Indeed, scholars of group identity speak of feelings along with behavior (usually home practice), informal association (spouses, friends, neighbors) and formal association (organizations, houses of worship, political action). Group dissolution (e.g., “assimilation”) proceeds by way of declines in association and practice. Feelings are the last to go.

Thus, we have, as respected social scientist Herbert Gans writes, lots of “Jews by feeling.” But we have fewer Jews-by-association and fewer-Jews-by-practice/behavior.

So, all is not collapsing in Jewish life. But we are seeing declines in the “Jewish Middle” — those who are actively Jewish but generally not as engaged as the Orthodox nor as unengaged as the thousands of Jews-by-feeling.

To say otherwise is an (understandable) act of delusion or denial (with apologies to my many dear friends and esteemed colleagues who say otherwise). If we are going to address the challenges facing American Jewry, we’ll need to address their true nature with proven instruments of change.

What a great article and, more fundamentally, a great development for Clal and similar organizations, and for the Jewish future.

I have profound respect for Steven M. Cohen and his insights for Jewish life; it is with deep humility that I disagree. The richness and multitude of Jewish renaissance programs in my community in Baltimore and across North America and Israel leave me strained to see the declines in the “Jewish Middle” if that means Jews who are “not as engaged as the Orthodox nor as un-engaged as the thousands of Jews-by-feeling.” The embrace and re-invention of Jewish practice by thousands of young Jews – my children, their counselors and teachers, young people I have been privileged to meet in Israel and across the FSU – who are remarkably literate tells me, at least qualitatively, that the opposite is true. Certainly action, more than feeling, is the most meaningful metric of community. Yet it is exactly this metric that shows growth – in the proliferation of progressive and entrepreneurial Jewish groups, media, and gatherings. By Clal’s own account, as Maayan Jaffe reports, participation is increasing. We are awash in creative Jewish practice, Jewish community, and Jewish meaning.

In a world where I could stand beside the Commandant of the Marine Corps (not-Jewish!) and hear him ask a group of (non-Jewish) business executives if they had “chutzpah,” I don’t think we have lost a middle-engaged Jewish cohort; we have shed an anxiety that had called upon “Jews-by-feeling” to affiliate institutionally and accept communal norms as protection from loneliness, if not outright violence. That’s not really the “Middle” Dr. Cohen describes, though I suspect it is the demographic he has seen decline. Rabbi Kula’s point about Jewish identity is not that it is sufficient but that it is safe. The billions of dollars spent to protect it have not yielded fewer intermarriages nor higher rates of congregational affiliation. The relatively few dollars spent to re-invent it and give it meaning in the modern context have.

I have no doubt that thousands of non-Orthodox Jews are leading meaningful, committed, engaged and contributing Jewish lives. And I have no doubt that the individual examples you provide are not isolated but repeated again and again.

But, I do doubt whether the observations of Jewish “insiders” (like you and me) speak to the condition of the Jewish collective. After all, in our everyday lives, we insiders are bound to encounter the encouraging success stories. So, our view is, well, biased.

To get an unbiased view of the entire Jewish population, let’s turn to the Random Digit Dialed Jews who get to speak on our surveys. What do they tell us? (Those who are non-Orthodox.)

A feritlity rate of 1.7 (when we need 2.1 for population stability).
An intermarriage rate of 72%.
A rate of raising children as Jews-by-religion of only 9% among the children of intermarriage.

Of those 40-49, just 32% report that they’re raising a Jew-by-religion. In other words, 2/3 of non-Orthodox 40-somethings lake the prime reason that people their age join a congregation.
Moreover, of Jews 55-64, we have 3 times as many who say they belong to a congregation and who say they’re Reform as among those 35-44. And the ratio is not much better for the Conservative shul-affiliated.

If all this is true, we’d see declining number of kids in supplementary schools; fewer in non-Orthodox day schools; fewer donors to Federation; fewer Conservative and Reform synagogues, aging congregations (on average). And, sadly, we see all these signs.

So, how can we not worry about the vitality of the Jewish Middle? And, why shouldn’t we worry?

I would like to join this conversation and say this is exactly why I am so grateful and proud to be joining the upcoming cohort of RWB! The statistics completely reflect a reality of Jewish life I see in our mid-size Southern city of Winston-Salem, NC. We remain a tight and strong progressive/liberal (Reform) Jewish community though show the stresses and influences of being a Jew in America today.

Our synagogue, please God, is strong and not going anywhere. But overall engagement and commitment is a struggle. We work diligently on creating a meaningful and relevant Judaism here but to a gradually smaller devoted membership. Our temple’s work, and my rabbinic time, in the larger community is extensive and makes wonderful inroads but the future for our Jewish community is uncertain, which is why we work hard to foster good experiences for every person who comes through our doors or whom we touch in the wider community and at the same time build endowments. And we worry because we are Jews. It’s in our spiritual DNA.

There are countless bright lights for people to discuss and uphold with pride of American Jewish life. But how involved most American Jews are or will be … will depend largely on personal choice and what choices are made available by those of us in positions to make a difference.

No one can dispute that the numbers of non-Orthodox, American-born Jews are declining (as is the case for comparable socio-economic cohorts of Americans) or that rates of participation in synagogues, schools, and other communal institutions are falling, while rates of intermarriage have been rising. The question for community planners and advocates for the Jewish future is then why and with what implications.
A traditional school of thought has been that these trends are driven internally and reflect waning Jewish identity. Since 1990, enormous investments have been made, based on this hypothesis, to shore up identity with widened access to Israel, financial support for day schools, and pedagogic reform in religious schools and informal education. I have been and am an advocate of all of these investments, which have fundamentally enhanced the quality of Jewish life for those who embrace it. However as a response to the cited trends, they have had virtually no impact after 25 years. Proposals outlined in the “Statement on Jewish Vitality” reflect a “best practice” approach to the same strategy. In that sense, it is a recommendation to double down.
An alternative hypothesis to explain falling rates of affiliation with traditional Jewish communal institutions is that the driver is external, not internal. It might be that Jewish identity per se is at least as strong today as it was 60 years ago and that rather what has changed is the wider American society and its acceptance and integration of Jewish ethnicity. It might be that large numbers of American Jews who previously joined synagogues, sent their children to Jewish schools, and contributed to Federations and other Jewish causes did so out of a sense of social connection and limited choice. Put another way, if “yiddishkeit” is accessible on prime time television, from chain restaurants, and mainstream American celebrities and politicians, what then is the value proposition of traditional Jewish institutions to those who participated as a search for belonging within a comfortable Jewish experience? And if there is no compelling answer to that question, the fall-off in affiliation would not, in that case, be declining engagement from the middle but the availability of alternatives that undermine the basis of what had, in effect, artificially bolstered those numbers to begin with. The middle, if the lens is focused on them rather than the institutions they once patronized, didn’t shrink, it is engaged elsewhere. Or, put more smugly (sorry!), the analogy is that the falling use of telephone land lines might mean that younger generations do not communicate with each other, but it could be they found Instagram.
If the alternative hypothesis is correct, then engagement with Jewish institutions will be driven by their relevance to contemporary life, rather than their resonance with Jewish identity. Kosher restaurateurs have known for decades, depending on their market, they must have some percentage of clientele that is not Kosher observant. That is, relying upon a sense of commitment to religious norms, however strongly encouraged, is not a viable business model. It is also necessary to create an experience that appeals to – delights – customers regardless of the obligations they have assumed for themselves. The same can now be said for the entire experience of communal life. Those institutions and programs that provide Jewish values and wisdom as meaning-making and purpose-fulfilling for navigating the American experience early 21st century will thrive (and are thriving), while those providing membership as a proposed corollary to Jewish identity will struggle even as they work to reinforce that identity.

Issues of gender and generational absence aside, I cannot think of three more thoughtful colleagues I would want to be stuck in a hotel bar with during a snowstorm than Freedman, Cohen, and Kula. Steve fears that we will in a generation or two go the way of the Shakers with only our ethical and intellectual furniture surviving while both Matt and Irwin believe that the challenge of the moment is to rediscover and create in the now intentional communities that model the type of Jewishness that will attract and engage the larger society and attract willing future participants. Steve would, I believe, not disagree but would immediately focus dollars and efforts on the young while his two colleagues would have, given their prescription, a smaller cohort of change agents and a more generationally diverse audience marked for intervention. If my hypothetical snowstorm lasts long enough perhaps there might be a meeting of the minds on tactical next steps or at least some creative synthesis for the use of limited resources that allows both strategies to proceed productively. Or, more likely, airports as they must reopen and everyone has their own planes going in different directions to catch. Chaval.

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